Italy-Norway – E. Olsen: “We didn't play up to our limit”

“First of all, I have to congratulate ITALY for their victory. Of course, I am disappointed for several reasons. We didn’t play up to our limit, and I think that if we had done that, we would have beaten ITALY. I’m in fact not very impressed with ITALY either, so it was more because we didn’t play well that we lost the match. I’m disappointed.

We came here with a first aim to go through and be among the last 16 and we reached that, but when you are there, you want to go further. In fact we had a good chance today, but our performance was not good and we didn’t take advantage of the chances we had in the second half. ITALY was tired and we had a good chance in the last part of the second half.

It’s difficult to say whether the hot conditions today affected the performance of our team, but I think the heat affected the Italian team, too, because they looked more tired than us in the last minutes of the game.

I don’t regret having maintained my decision to run one sole striker.

If we had qualified for the quarter finals, FRANCE would have been a much more difficult opponent than ITALY. I think that FRANCE are one of the World Cup favourites. I wasn’t very impressed by BRAZIL, but at this level there isn’t much difference between the teams. If FRANCE qualify for the quarter finals, I would be very surprised if the Italians succeeded in beating them.”